Wednesday, September 26, 2012

When Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Became a Pessimist

From the Telegraph:

...People sometimes ask when I became a pessimist. The answer is the
summer of 1991 when I accompanied Serb troops into the Baroque city of
Vukovar – shattered by howitzer shelling within a comfortable drive from
Vienna, and strewn with the bodies of dead children – and watched 300
wounded prisoners taken from hospital. I assumed they were at last safe.
We learned later that they were machine-gunned shortly afterwards at a
collective farm nearby.

The unthinkable was happening before my eyes, though it was small in
scale compared to the slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at
Srebrenica, which I later covered at a trial in The Hague....